


Cracking Jokes

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry IV Part 2 - Shakespeare
Genre: 1920s, Alternate Universe, Canonical Character Death, Capital Punishment, Execution, Friends to Enemies, Hearing the Chimes at Midnight, Ireland, Irish Civil War, Lovers To Enemies, M/M, Non-Canonical Character Death, Old Friends, Old Lovers, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 17:58:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4715189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two scenes from <i>Henry IV Part Two</i>, in Irish Civil War AU.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: it's the Irish Civil War so everything is fairly awful, but no graphic violence; strong misogynistic language, sexism, non-canonical character death, canonical character death, betrayal, judicial and extra-judicial killing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. No clear fact

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> A treat slightly at a slant from skazka's request to see the personnel of _Henry V_ against the background of another conflict, which I hope will be forgiven in the interest of MOAR Falstaff/Shallow.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a brief history of the Irish Civil War can be found [here](http://www.theirishstory.com/2012/07/02/the-irish-civil-war-a-brief-overview/).
> 
> This fic blurs and fictionalises the timeline of that conflict, but makes reference to events that happened in the summer and autumn of 1922.

‘Oh shit, it’s fucking Conroy. Excuse me. Eileen, I need you to do something. Don’t worry, and for Jesus’ sake don’t _look_ worried. When we get to the bridge, I want you to say goodbye to me, quite naturally, and walk on up to St Saviour’s. Ask for Father Morton. Don’t talk to anyone but him. Tell him I sprained my wrist hurling and can’t serve at Mass.’

Her brother sneered at GAA culchies and had never served Mass in his heathen life. Eileen’s eyes grew wide. ‘Ned—’ 

‘No time. Say to Ma I met some pals and left you off to Miss Harcourt’s on your own.’ 

‘But—’ 

‘—I can live with Ma giving out to me. Go on, go, go, go.’ 

* 

‘Too pretty a girl to be keeping company with you, Poyntz.’ 

‘My sister.’ 

‘I see. Missed out on the family looks, so. I’d say all the youngfellas _follow_ ,’ Conroy put the lightest of emphases on the verb, ‘her home from school.’ 

‘She’s _fourteen_ , Harry.’ 

‘Calm to fuck down. I wasn’t proposing to _marry_ her or anything. Tell me, Ned, what do you see of Jack these days?’ 

‘Same as you. You were always closer to him than I.’ 

‘Oh, yes. I know Jack well, and of old. Castle Catholics, his people were. I wouldn't have counted him among the die-hards. But I asked about _you_.’ 

‘I’m not on anyone’s side.’ 

‘Oh, I know, Ned. We keep quite a close eye on you. Laundry lists, practically. Actually, once _literally_ ,’ he mimicked the Dublin fricative, ‘laundry lists. One shirt a week, beneath that clerkly celluloid collar, is it? You used to dress—well, you used to dress.’ 

A bubble of derisive laughter formed under Ned’s ribcage. Back in the day, when they were on the same side, he used to set everything up for Conroy, who treated the whole business as a huge practical joke. This callow attempt at a threat was nothing more, just Harry slagging him. The bubble burst, leaving shreds of cold fear behind. Conroy was an officer in the National Army. His people were Free State aristocracy, the new ruling class. Ned was a nobody with his shirt out at one elbow under his frieze coat, who had been lucky to escape when his unit fled from the burning block of hotels on O’Connell Street, melting into the civilian crowd on Parnell Street, then bolting south for the Wicklow Hills. Jack had been at the outpost on Aungier Street, at the Swan. Trust Jack to get himself stationed in a bar. 

‘Then you’ll know I’ve seen nothing of Jack since Dublin—’ oh, Jesus to fuck, what did it matter, anyway? ‘fell. And I’ll bid you good day.’ He turned to go. 

‘Oh no.’ Conroy’s bony hand landed heavily on Ned’s shoulder, wrenching him back around. He never had a light touch, Ned reflected, never cared to tease or please, paid scant regard even to his own gratification, one eye always on the figure he cut—Christ, why was he thinking of _that_? Over and done with never ceases. Conroy _would_ marry, doubtless, a daughter of one of his father’s cronies, beef to the heel like a Mullingar heifer, and trouble her every Saturday night whether he fancied it or not until he had an heir and a spare. 

He pulled back. Conroy loosened his grip into a hideous parody of a friendly squeeze. 

‘There’s a little favour I’d like you to do me, Poyntz—by which I mean the nation. It even comes with a new-starched shirt front.’ 

The corner of his mouth twitched upward, meeting the deep scar that jagged down from his left cheekbone. For a moment, half of his lean face looked split open to the ear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GAA: Gaelic Athletic Association
> 
> culchies: country people
> 
> Castle Catholics: Catholic Unionists, loyal to the British administration in Dublin Castle 
> 
> 'burning block of hotels': Poyntz fought in the last, desperate action of the Battle of Dublin in early July 1922, when Oscar Traynor and Cathal Brugha sought to open a front on O'Connell Street, drawing Free State forces away from the Four Courts.


	2. The finest play

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a sort of crossover with Yeats's poem 'The Road at My Door' (below, part of the sequence _Meditations in Time of Civil War_ , from which I take both the fic and chapter titles).
> 
> An affable Irregular,  
> A heavily-built Falstaffian man,  
> Comes cracking jokes of civil war  
> As though to die by gunshot were  
> The finest play under the sun.  
> 
> 
> A brown Lieutenant and his men,  
>  Half dressed in national uniform,  
>  Stand at my door, and I complain  
>  Of the foul weather, hail and rain,  
>  A pear-tree broken by the storm.  
> 
> 
> I count those feathered balls of soot  
>  The moor-hen guides upon the stream.  
>  To silence the envy in my thought;  
>  And turn towards my chamber, caught  
>  In the cold snows of a dream.  
> 

The column looked shabby, National Army green supplemented here and there by grey and blue worsteds and flannels. Robert watched the soldiers to the bend in the road, then turned back towards his house, the medieval keep he’d altered and decked for a peaceful old age, which good sense and his cousin Ó Ciúnas had repeatedly told him to abandon to IRA incendiaries, go and settle in Dublin; London even. But he hadn’t fought a war against those other bastards in mismatched uniforms to do that—not that Robert had seen active service _as such_ —he was a bit old to go bucklepping over the furze in a trenchcoat with a banjaxed Lee Enfield. How miserably civilian he must have seemed to that handsome, brown-faced lieutenant, he thought glumly, complaining about the weather, the broken boughs of his little pear tree, as if the Government could do something about it. He’d talk to Davy, perhaps he could graft—oh, but he couldn’t bear to look at it now. He’d go down to the stream, see if the moorhen chicks were leaving the nest yet; he had heard their shy, furious peeps and squeaks when he was there last—

He let out a pretty shrill noise himself as part of a hazel coppice detached itself and stood in his path. It was scarcely believable that the bulk thus presented could be concealed by such slender branches and thinning leaves, but— 

‘J—Jack?’ 

He clicked his heels and swept off his tweed cap in a low bow, revealing a bald pate red and peeling, around which grey hair had started to grow long enough to fall into curls. When he and Robert had lodged together in Paris for a few months in the early nineties, he had worn it below his ears. 

‘A humble forester greets your honour.’ 

‘What in Christ’s name—’ 

‘Oh, I’m here off-ee-shul, like. The fellas,’ he jerked his thumb vaguely, ‘thought I might like to take the opportunism to tell me auld segocia the town solicitor that there’s to be some _activity_ round here for the next couple of nights—make of that what you will, though what I’d make of it is take a room,’ he gazed deliberately up the road towards the tower, ‘in O’Sullivan’s Hotel. In short, we’re blowing up the bridge. We’ll try to mind your delft.’ 

‘Will you in your bollocks.’ 

Jack threw back his head and laughed wheezily. ‘No, I don’t suppose we will.’ 

‘You’ll be wanting to come and see it one last time, so.’ 

He fell silent mid-bellow and gave Robert a wary look. His face had the high colour and broken veins not now of drink but of rough sleeping. Its flesh hung slack and there was dirt in the lines around eyes and mouth. His collarless neck was corded with filth. 

'You will, you will, you will, Jack. You can have a wash, and I’ve a bottle of Jameson with only a finger gone out of it, and two hundred Turkish cigarettes just sent from town. You will, sure, go on.’ 

‘We—el. It’s fraternising—’ 

‘—we _were_ brothers, once. No excuses. Go on, go on, go on, go on, _go on_ —’ 

Jack’s grin restored his looks to their wonted amplitude. He nodded, and as Robert made to move off, flung an arm clad in stained gaberdine around his shoulders. Robert stumbled trying not to recoil from the stink. 

* 

They drank whiskey out of the Edouard Honoré teacups, a souvenir of that long-ago Paris sojourn, that were not, in fact, destined to perish in the destruction of the bridge, and Jack told tales of civil war. 

‘—you knew Poyntz, didn’t you? Foxy little fella, used to hang around with Conroy, dogging his heels, blacking his boots, licking his—’ the glint in Jack's eyes, still wind-narrowed but no longer framed with grimy furrows, the offered scrub-up having been accepted, _might_ have been just general ribaldry. ‘Ah, no reflection, Robbie, no reflection.’ 

Robert shivered and took a breath as if to speak, but Jack ran on. 

‘ _Anyway_ , don’t I drop by the Downshire House Hotel in old Ballycomeen a little while back, to carouse with a ladyfriend of mine, and find he’s taken orders—as grand a little curate as ever wore a dicky and apron, and I says to myself, that’s the wrong side of the counter to find Neddy Poyntz—and so it was.’ 

‘You mean he’s an—’ Robert choked on the word, or maybe just on his drink. 

Jack nodded. ‘Was.’ 

‘And you—?’ 

‘Not me myself, like. It would have been too much like there was a personal score to settle, and there wasn’t. Christ, but I wouldn’t care to wait it out to the crack of doom up there in the Wicklow mountains. An unhallowed grave, a shallow, shallow grave—Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Just babbling—the words, you know—’ 

Robert made a helpless gesture of consolation. ‘I know.’ 

Jack took a cigarette from the box, lit it at the table lighter, and embarked on an anecdote that started in Keystone Cops farce, and ended with six of his column shot dead on the slopes of Ben Bulben. Robert decided firmly that he would rather not know how Jack had hauled his unathletic frame up that noble brow, nor how he managed to get down again unscathed when every other IRA combatant had been killed or taken prisoner. 

‘—and so that’s what made me the way I am today.’ He indicated his darned pullover and baggy twill trousers, shiny with impacted grime where they weren’t stained—for all fractured and broken supply lines had rendered Jack a shadow of his former self, there was still nothing of Robert’s that he could get even an arm into. ‘We’re finished, Robbie. That cunt MacEoin’s got us on the run, and from here on in, it’s all twopenny-ha’penny shite and onions. Derailing trains and burning Big Houses. Just giving them a dawk in the ribs there, a tax of the balls there—until they hang us all for it. Fucked. Fucked from a height.’ He brought his open hand down on the arm of the chair, a swift, meaty chop. 

‘Oh, Jack. Dear Jack—how do you—?’ 

‘Keep going? Fucked if I know. Not all the bollocks we used to talk about Ireland free. Some sort of—sense of honour, I suppose—though God knows an honourable death on Monday is wrapping fish suppers in Burdock’s by Wednesday.’ He looked around wildly, reached for the cigarette box, seemed to think the better of it, then took one anyway. He put it to his lips and let it dangle there unlit. ‘I don’t think—’ he mumbled through the obstruction, ‘I don’t think I can—go back.’ His hands were shaking, his eyes rheumy and wet. 

There was nothing else Robert could have done, only get up, cross the hearthrug, bend to take the cigarette from his friend’s lips, and put his own there. It took them to Robert’s bed, where they found that half a bottle of John Jameson’s patent liniment did nothing to stiffen members thirty years older than when last they’d done something like this, two solemn madcaps not long sworn into a secret society devoted to the overthrow of British rule in Ireland and the establishment thereto of a democratic republic, in a flyblown attic overlooking the illimitable rain-glistering roofs of Paris. And they laughed at themselves, both for their delirious youth and disappointed age. 

So when news came of Jack’s arrest, the verdict of the tribunal (presided over by young Harry Conroy), his death of pneumonia before sentence could be carried out, Robert tried to take some comfort in the knowledge that the last time he’d seen his old comrade, old brother, old lover, he'd seen him in some measure content.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'medieval keep': Robert lives in a fictionalised version of Yeats's Galway residence [Thoor Ballylee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoor_Ballylee).
> 
> 'those other bastards in mismatched uniforms': i.e. the Black and Tans.
> 
> segocia: friend 
> 
> delft: porcelain
> 
> curate: (now dated) barman
> 
> 'six of his column shot dead on the slopes of Ben Bulben': a decisive action in Seàn MacEoin's securing of Co. Sligo for the Free State in September 1922 involved a gun battle on [Ben Bulben](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benbulbin).
> 
> Burdock's: the most famous fish and chip shop in Dublin, opened in 1913.
> 
> 'a secret society': the Irish Republican Brotherhood, precursor to many physical-force Republican groups in early 20th-century Ireland.


End file.
